DownloadLawrence Thornton
Contemporary Authors Online, 2006 
  Born: October 14, 1937 in Pomona, California, United States 
  Nationality: American 
  Occupation: Novelist 
 
Lawrence Thornton
WRITINGS:
  Unbodied Hope: Narcissism and the Modern Novel (criticism), Bucknell 
  University Press, 1984. 
  Imagining Argentina (novel), Doubleday, 1987. 
  Under the Gypsy Moon (novel), Doubleday, 1990. 
  Ghost Woman, Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1992. 
  Naming the Spirits, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1995. 
  Tales from the Blue Archives Doubleday (New York, NY), 1997. 
  Sailors on the Inward Sea,, Free Press (New York, NY), 2004.
Thornton's novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Swedish, 
Danish, Portuguese, and Finnish.
Imagining Argentina was adapted as a film, starring Antonio Bandera and Emma 
Thompson, written and directed by Christopher Hampton, Myriad Pictures, 2003.
Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, assistant professor, 1974-79, associate 
professor of English, 1980-84; writer. Visiting professor at Carleton College, 
1980; visiting associate professor at University of California--Los Angeles and 
University of California--Santa Barbara, 1984-88; writer in residence at 
University of California--Irvine, 1990.
Fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts; 
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and Faulkner Award nomination, PEN American 
Center, award for best novel, PEN Center USA West, silver medal, Commonwealth 
Club of California, and Shirley Collier Award, University of California--Los 
Angeles, all 1988, all for Imagining Argentina.
Born October 14, 1937, in Pomona, CA; son of James Winston (a salesman) and June 
(a medical secretary; maiden name, Wallace) Thornton; married Toni Clark (a 
professor of English), 1969. Education: University of California--Santa Barbara, 
B.A., 1960, M.A., 1967, Ph.D., 1973. Politics: "Liberal Democrat." Memberships: 
PEN American Center, PEN Center USA West. Addresses: Home: 603 W. Eighth St., 
Claremont, CA 91711. Agent: c/o Author Mail, Simon and Schuster, Free Press 
Publicity, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
"Sidelights"
In his award-winning first novel, Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton depicts 
the horrors of political repression in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. During 
that period, the country's military rulers carried out a reign of terror by 
kidnapping and murdering thousands of people. Many were students who dared to 
criticize the regime's policies; others were journalists and political opponents 
whom the government considered subversive. The fate of the victims followed a 
similar pattern: those targeted by the military were picked up by the secret 
police, tortured and killed, and their bodies buried in mass graves. Family 
members were rarely able to learn the whereabouts of a missing relative, and the 
victims came to be called los desaparecidos, meaning "those who disappeared."
Thornton's inspiration for the novel came from watching a news program that 
chronicled how mothers whose sons and daughters were missing gathered daily in a 
public square in Buenos Aires to demand information about their children. The 
story that grew out of this program tells of Carlos Rueda, a playwright for a 
children's theater. Rueda is devastated when he returns home one day and finds 
that his wife, a journalist, has been taken away by the police, apparently after 
writing an article about the killings of several high school students. Shortly 
thereafter, Rueda makes a startling discovery: he has the ability to see in his 
mind what happens to victims after they are abducted.
Reviewers praised Thornton for creating a compelling, moving drama out of the 
painful reality of Argentina's past. In a Washington Post Book World article, 
Patrick Breslin wrote that "Thornton takes for his material one of the bleaker 
recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human 
spirit, and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit." Several critics lauded 
the author's use of fantasy to enrich a starkly realistic setting, a technique 
made famous by some of Latin America's most eminent writers, including Jorge 
Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Writing in the New York Times, Michiko 
Kakutani noted that "although Mr. Thornton is an American who has never lived in 
Latin America, he seems to have wedded his study of such writers as Borges and 
Marquez with his own instinctive gift for metaphor and in doing so, created his 
own brand of magical realism."
Several reviewers commented on Imagining Argentina's setting and imagery. Some 
felt that Thornton's evocation of Argentina, while an admirable attempt for a 
writer who has not visited the country, was a weakness in the book. New York 
Times Book Review contributor Leigh Hafrey, for instance, commented that the 
author's difficulty in depicting the country is evident in "the movie-lot 
quality of many of his scenes." Jason Wilson, writing in the Times Literary 
Supplement, noted that "the background and realistic detail do not always ring 
true." Kakutani, however, found that Imagining Argentina succeeds in evoking the 
country. "Its images have the power to persuade," the critic remarked, "and they 
underline very clearly the ways in which ... magic realism mirrors the surreal 
horror of politics in this part of the world." The PEN American Center judges 
were similarly impressed, particularly praising the author's symbolic bird 
imagery in the 1988 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award citation.
Naming the Spirits continues the story of Imagining Argentina, centered around a 
mute girl who escaped a mass execution and is now haunted by the spirits of her 
fellow captives who did not survive. The book's web-like narrative also 
encompasses Carlos Rueda, who told a Buenos Aires couple whose daughter 
disappeared that the mute girl--Carlos's daughter--would find them. In Naming 
the Spirits, Carlos retains the power first described in Imagining Argentina to 
divine the stories and fates of the disappeared when he hears their names. In 
addition to his daughter, his journalist wife, Cecelia, was abducted after she 
wrote an editorial about missing students. Carlos tries to keep Cecelia alive by 
imagining her still living, and Cecelia herself has imagined her own memoir in 
her mind as an exercise in keeping herself alive.
As the dead continue to exhort the mute girl to remember them and tell their 
stories to the world, she slowly regains her voice and ultimately releases a 
shower of origami birds into the sky that unlocks the voices of the fallen 
prisoners, shattering the silence that surrounded the war--a silence that had 
culminated in amnesty for those who committed the atrocities and appropriated 
orphaned children for their own benefit. "Thornton's novel," wrote Nation 
contributor Patrick Markee, "like Carlos's gift, fills that emptiness with names 
and stories and a promise never to forget." Similarly, Booklist critic Joanne 
Wilkinson appreciated Thornton's story for its lack of overt violence, which 
results in "elegiac prose" that contains "the resonance of myth," and a writer 
for Publishers Weekly commented that the "novel's very restraint contributes to 
its resonance."
Thornton continues his story about Argentina and the los desaparecidos in the 
trilogy's third novel, Tales from the Blue Archives, which takes place after the 
civil war. In it, Dolores Masson searches for years to discover the fate of her 
grandsons, who were supposedly given to a childless couple during the war after 
the disappearance of Masson's children, her grandsons' parents. Her journey 
leads her to an encounter with the military officer responsible for their fates, 
who has survived the war and even profited extravagantly from it. Booklist 
critic Bonnie Smothers considered the story, despite its authentically sounding 
South American tone, "overwritten," but still "compelling" and "bittersweet." In 
a Library Journal review, Margaret A. Smith offered high praise for the novel, 
calling it "a beautifully written and arresting story" full of hope.
Other novels by Thornton include Under the Gypsy Moon and Ghost Woman. Under the 
Gypsy Moon melds fact and fiction in telling the story of real-life Spanish 
literary legend Federico Garcia Lorca and the fictional Spanish-German novelist 
Joaquin Wolf, both of whom have suffered in war, with Garcia Lorca giving his 
life to it. The story is told by Ursula Kreiger, Wolf's girlfriend, who 
recognizes startling similarities between Garcia Lorca's poems and the 
experiences of her own romance with Wolf. The novel was praised by many critics, 
including a Publishers Weekly reviewer who applauded "the searing intensity of 
Thornton's imagination." Ghost Woman is a tale about Sage, a Chumash Indian in 
California who is the only survivor when her village is raided and its 
inhabitants slain (including her infant daughter) or enslaved. Sage wanders the 
coast for ten years before coming to the attention of a Spanish priest who is 
determined to convert her to Christianity. Ultimately, having been raped and 
impregnated by a rancher who takes her in, she commits suicide, with her ghost 
continuing to exact retribution from the family's descendants.
In Sailors on the Inward Sea, Thornton again mixes fact and fiction through the 
memoir of Jack Malone, a sailor who claims to be Joseph Conrad's inspiration for 
Marlow, the hero of Conrad's classic novel Heart of Darkness. Indeed, the story 
is steeped in the lore of Conrad's real-life observations regarding a deadly 
encounter between a British minesweeper and a German submarine during World War 
I. Joseph Conrad himself is a character in the Thornton's story, who, having 
spent hours swapping seafaring stories with Malone, uses Malone's experiences in 
creating Marlow, the hero of both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Malone, having 
discovered this, feels betrayed by his friend, and has written this memoir 
several years after Conrad's death in order to set the record straight. 
According to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Sailors on the Inward Sea is an 
"eloquent meditation on friendship and storytelling." Though Patrick Sullivan, 
writing in the Library Journal, thought that Malone's internal conflict was a 
bit thin, he nevertheless concluded that the novel was "ambitious" and contains 
"passages of great power and beauty." Brad Hooper, a contributor to Booklist, 
appreciated the book's sense of adventure as well as its "psychological probing 
of the artistic mind and the plundering of other people's lives."
Thornton once told CA: "Having waited until my late forties to devote myself 
full time to fiction has given me the advantage of pretty well knowing what I 
want to write. If I'd started at a younger age I might have indulged in 
autobiographical fiction, but I don't see anything like that on the horizon. I 
believe that fiction plays an important social function, and while novelists 
can't expect their works to change the world, we have to believe it's possible. 
That's why my themes are political. I think the writer has an obligation to deal 
with important materials and do what he can to shed light on those 
events--present and past--that he considers important."
 
en
Further Readings
PERIODICALS
  Booklist, July, 1995, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Naming the Spirits, p. 1861; 
  October 15, 1997, Bonnie Smothers, review of Tales from the Blue Archives, p. 
  390; August, 2004, Brad Hooper, review of Sailors on the Inward Sea, p. 1904. 
  Library Journal, October 1, 1997, Margaret A. Smith, review of Tales from the 
  Blue Archives, p. 127; September 1, 2004, Patrick Sullivan, review of Sailors 
  on the Inward Sea, p. 143. 
  Nation, September 25, 1995, Patrick Markee, review of Naming the Spirits, p. 
  324. 
  New York Times, November 11, 1987, Michiko Kakutani, review of Imagining 
  Argentina, p. 21. 
  New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1987, Leigh Hafrey, review of 
  Imagining Argentina, p. 11. 
  Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Under the Gypsy 
  Moon, p. 432; March 16, 1992, review of Ghost Woman, p. 63; May 29, 1995, 
  review of Naming the Spirits, p. 64; September 13, 2004, review of Sailors on 
  the Inward Sea, p. 58. 
  Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 1988, Jason Wilson, review of Imagining 
  Argentina, p. 30. 
  Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 13, 1987, review of Imagining 
  Argentina, p. 7. 
  Washington Post Book World, October 11, 1987, Patrick Breslin, review of 
  Imagining Argentina. 
Full Text:  COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning. 
Source Citation:
"Lawrence Thornton." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Gale 
Biography In Context. Web. 31 Aug. 2011.
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